What the heck is Ehrensenf, you are possibly going to ask. Since you're asking, it's more or less like the German equivalent to Rocketboom. If you don't know Rocketboom, check it out. If you speak German and don't know Ehrensenf, have a look. Right, I am writing about video blogging/Internet TV/geek TV, whatever you want to call it.
I love good video web content
In fact, I was quite late to the trend and only started watching Rocketboom on a regular basis after the whole Amanda unboomed saga had drawn my attention to it. Then I found out about Ehrensenf, and before I knew it, I had been sucked into the “Very attractive host talks to a geek audience about geeky or otherwise eccentric content in a very fast-paced and slightly foxy manner“ format. Apart from a few shows, conventional TV makes me yawn, and I cannot wait for more media content in the new and more flexible formats favoured by the Internet.
First things first, before I get into why I am posting this to four different categories, as unconnected to the central topic as “Localization and Internationalization”, I'd like to send my best birthday wishes to the Ehrensenf crew whose show, today, celebrated its first anniversary since its launch last year. Keep up the good work!
Vlogs and language
Now, what is this post doing in the “Language and Translation” category?
I have noticed that video blogs are an excellent means to improve language skills. Translation students have always benefitted from foreign-language TV, but as I mentioned before, TV is boring. Also, thanks to their fast-paced dramaturgy, video blogs tend to present vocabulary from loads of different fields and many different levels of style in a very short time span. More importantly, video blogs such as Rocketboom or Ehrensenf are unthinkable without a healthy amount or humour, and the key to a good understanding of a foreign language is understanding the jokes. At present, I am helping my little brother prepare for his high school graduation, and to improve his English skills, I have advised him to watch Rocketboom every day.
It is also interesting to note how vlogs deal with multilingual content – and there's a lot of multilingual content out there, just take Ruud Elmendorp's excellent contributions to Rocketboom as an example. Just a few days ago, he won the International TV Award. Congratulations, and thanks for both delivering such interesting quality content and fully embracing the Internet to make your voice heard. I like to point those of my friends who still believe that the web is the playground for the amateurs and the Internet and serious journalism are antipodes to courageous journalists such as you!
I am wondering how the dubbing and translation of this content happens. Generally speaking, we are still waiting for translation vendors to fully embrace the web as a social network and a platform of automated collaboration. I am talking about web services and a more dynamic understanding of the entire translation process, which still comes with a lot of friction. This may sound quite vague, but as far as I am aware (I may be wrong, I am not an expert), the file formats commonly used for video content on the web (Flash on sites such as YouTube, QuickTime, Real and Windows Media on a lot of video blogs) do not have built-in functions for things such as subtitling which would make it difficult to include them in automated translation processes. As to Flash with which I do have some experience, it still has major troubles with some Unicode features, especially bi-directional text, and it favours creation processes that make localization troublesome.
Video and Web 2.0
Imagine a world where you could query a service like YouTube or a vlog software directly over its API from a localization suite (that still has to be created), only get the sound/speech along with the length restrictions for built-in subtitling, run it through a voice recognition software, through a CAT tool, let a human translator both correct the transcript and complete the translation within the given length restrictions, and then call the API again to integrate it back into the file via a built-in subtitling module. I know this is still Science Fiction, especially, translation software providers have to eventually embrace the idea of abstraction to a much higher degree in order to allow for such workflows, and media software providers have to look at internationalization as an integral part of the challenge rather than an after-thought – but it could bring much benefit to a vlog audience that have become profoundly international and look at themselves very much as citizens of the world as a lot of comments prove.
I would like to place these thoughts in a wider context – looking at today's web, I see a lot of things that I like, namely the fact that whilst the “semantic web” strictly speaking appears to be as far away as ever, a semantic web in a much wider sense has slowly been taking shape. Slim, meaningful mark-up, RSS, web services – all this helps create content that is primarily human-readable, but also logical, machine-readable, and prone to creating meaningful structures which are able to interact with each other. The days when an html page was looked at as just a Word document with links that you put on the Internet, so to speak, are definitely over.
But how does video content as such fit into all this? We are still far away from the transparency of information and meta-information that we have achieved with regards to textual content. Within the meanders of the social web, video still stands out as monolithic files or data streams that are just linked to, but are not organically integrated in its underlying tissue. Even making audio, let alone video, searchable in a meaningful way remains a challenge. However, it's exciting to think about where we are going with regards to these issues – and exploring this any further would certainly make this post far too long.
For the time being, let's enjoy what we've got and watch all these nice little stories that happen in our crazy, creative world.
Back to the top of this pageCategories: Language and Translation Localization and Internationalization Loose Talk Web Development and Programming
Keywords/tags: rocketboom ehrensenf elmendorp ruud elmendorp vlogs video blogging internet tv web 2.0 web services localization internationalization translation language dubbing rss semantic web
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